U.S. Pat. No. 6,832,296 describes a prefetch instruction for the x86 architecture that employs the REP prefix to prefetch multiple sequential cache lines from memory into the processor's cache memory, namely a number of sequential cache lines specified by a count in a general purpose register of the processor. However, there are situations in which the programmer knows that he wants to prefetch a set of cache lines that are non-sequential in memory, indeed seemingly arbitrary in their locations. A program wanting to accomplish the prefetch of multiple non-sequential cache lines would have to include multiple instances of the REP PREFETCH instruction described in the above patent to do so. This increases the code size and requires the processor to execute multiple instructions rather than a single instruction. Therefore, what is needed is an improved prefetch instruction that addresses these problems.